Evaluation of TikTok vs. Instagram Reels

I like that they asked actual users, and provided actual examples; it&#x27;s something I&#x27;ve always felt off about Instagram&#x27;s Reels vs TikTok. However the takeaway is that your TikTok feed is curated by hand by artisan robots vs Instagram is curated by lizards who only care about data.<p>Both companies are completely data driven with some amazing engineers; but <i>why</i> is the Reels product boring, while TikTok is engaging has to be something other than TikTok pulled the &quot;wholesome&quot; lever. (There was a ~month where I was getting incredibly depressing sideshows, so I don&#x27;t think tiktok is 100% wholesome).<p>My theory has been that people have been conditioned out of posting to Instagram (if you don&#x27;t have a literally perfect life, then why post) and as a result Instagram just has less content to draw upon. I think this effort to chase TikTok isn&#x27;t going to pan out because &quot;regular&quot; people aren&#x27;t posting to Instagram.

&gt; If Instagram wants to capture TikTok&#x27;s magical human touch, it needs to measure and optimize for something deeper.<p>I think this is really funny. The conclusion I would draw is slightly different - that Instagram isn&#x27;t Tiktok and it&#x27;s never going to be Tiktok. You can make Instagram&#x27;s algorithm exactly like Tiktok and it still won&#x27;t be like Tiktok because the users and content creators on Tiktok aren&#x27;t on Instagram, they&#x27;re not going to join instagram and the content creators you already have will leave.<p>Given this feedback cycle I find it quite interesting that Facebook don&#x27;t have a team of engineers just constantly building and launching new social media sites. Just massively raise the odds that the thing that displaces facebook is also owned by facebook.

I think this quote from a recent New Yorker article[1] sums up a subtle difference that’s easy to overlook. Topic has been on my mind a bit lately[2]:<p>“Chandlee, who spent more than twelve years at Mark Zuckerberg’s company before moving to TikTok, dismissed the idea [of concern over competition from Facebook]. “Facebook is a social platform. They’ve built all their algorithms based on the social graph,” he said, referring to the network of links to friends, family, and casual acquaintances that Facebook users painstakingly assemble over time. “We are an entertainment platform. The difference is significant.””<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newyorker.com&#x2F;culture&#x2F;cultural-comment&#x2F;tiktok-and-the-fall-of-the-social-media-giants" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newyorker.com&#x2F;culture&#x2F;cultural-comment&#x2F;tiktok-an...</a><p>[2] self plug, short set of questions on the recent Instagram makeover flop: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kvncnnlly.bearblog.dev&#x2F;copy-to-copy-copy-to-change&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kvncnnlly.bearblog.dev&#x2F;copy-to-copy-copy-to-change&#x2F;</a>

I think Meta really screwed up by not creating a stand-alone Reels app and instead trying to integrate it with Instagram. As someone who doesn&#x27;t really like Meta as a company, I would admittedly be interested in trying out a totally new video-centric app released by them.<p>But instead all they did was make instagram a little worse. I mean they already had instagram videos, shoe-horning a fifth tab at the bottom isn&#x27;t what people wanted. Seems like a really corporate, safe way of trying to compete.

Now ask the same question for YouTube shorts ;) Hah. Google is pushing shorts hard these days. Honestly, they need to give an option not to show shorts. In most cases, shorts are either from TikTok from the same content creator or re-uploaded by some random person. Even if I liked topic X on shorts, it never suggests similar shorts. It is hard to believe that Google cannot crack the correct algo to show interesting related shorts. I think YouTube doesn&#x27;t have enough <i>original</i> shorts content creators, and like many of Google&#x27;s side projects, it will go to &#x2F;dev&#x2F;null someday.

I&#x27;m one of the olds, but I wish Instagram would just go back to simple photo sharing with friends. No video, no sponsored posts, no ranking algorithm, just show me what my friends are up to, damn it!

Time to trot out <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dtc.umn.edu&#x2F;~odlyzko&#x2F;doc&#x2F;metcalfe.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dtc.umn.edu&#x2F;~odlyzko&#x2F;doc&#x2F;metcalfe.pdf</a> again. (Yes, I am one of the co-authors.)<p>Multiple lines of evidence point to the basic value of a social network scaling like `O(n log(n))`. So getting your first million users is hard. But after you&#x27;ve got there, you don&#x27;t have to be that much better than the competition to win. The conclusion is that social networks should be a lot less sticky and durable than it looks like.<p>We concluded that back when MySpace was the dominant social network. MySpace was overtaken by Friendster during the usual delays between a paper being submitted and published. Not long after, Facebook became king of the hill.<p>And then..Facebook remained there. In large part because they seem to have recognized their vulnerability, and so made a practice of buying new social networks like WhatsApp and Instagram before they grew up. However I concluded years ago that it was only a question of time until someone dethroned them.<p>Maybe it will be TikTok. Maybe TikTok gets shut down for political reasons. But the existential threat to Meta&#x27;s dominance is NOT going away. Simply being king of the social media hill is not a sustainable moat.

Wait, I need to ask about the sample data &amp; methodology here: - these 100 users they asked, were they already frequent users of TikTok and Instagram reels?<p>This experiment makes no sense if users spent a lot of time training the TikTok algorithm, prior to running the experiment while they didn&#x27;t train the Instagram Reels algorithm? Of course the results are more interesting and less generic if they had used TikTok a lot before...?

I disagree with their premise that Reels is &quot;performative&quot; while TikTok is &quot;authentic&quot;. They could have cherry picked other sample posts to demonstrate the exact opposite.<p>They&#x27;re both equally performative &amp; inauthentic.

I am very confident the image at the top of this article is generated by any of these currently popular text-to-image models. This feels like the beginning of ignoring artworks I see online, foreshadowed by header images at the start of tech blogs.

I feel like there is a big problem with this comparison: many of those asked to use TikTok and Reels already likely have been using TikTok for a while. Maybe I missed it but I didn&#x27;t see any mention of resetting TikTok so TikTok for them would have had a major advantage as its would have been pre-trained.

TikTok developed the whole contemporary mobile video style in concert with its users and it’s algorithm. I don’t think you can just copy the features and throw them at a different audience and expect things to work out.<p>I don’t think chasing the current hot thing is necessarily a terrible idea but I think pivoting your app constantly to chase the hot thing is. “Be willing to cannibalize your user base” doesn’t mean “force new things on your user base”!

TikTok has such a content and data advantage. More viewers, more creators, more content. Feels like it’ll be very hard for Meta, YouTube or any competitor to come back without coming up with a hugely superior recommendation algorithm, and TikTok’s feels hard to beat, or some kind of improved creation tools that give it a content library advantage.<p>And TikTok just has the momentum, the cool factor. Instagram did too when the idea of having a high quality networked camera and fun filters with you all the time was revolutionary, and Instagram was the way to take advantage of it. Now that phone power, storage space, network bandwidth, and good editing software have made watchable short video easy to shoot, TikTok is that platform.

Why would Instagram even try to be TikTok to begin with? Why show a firehose of short videos that just makes everyone who made your platform what it is, hate it?<p>How will you tell who is leaving the platform because it&#x27;s suddenly TikTok (like me) vs who&#x27;s leaving the platform <i>for</i> TikTok?

Been running some Facebook Lead ads recently. The ads are designed to run on both Facebook and Instagram.<p>(Facebook owns Instagram)<p>The lead reports show where they are coming from.<p>Overwhelmingly from Instagram. I think we got about 20% of leads from core Facebook and the rest from IG.<p>The core old timey Facebook is actually dying pretty quickly. All the traffic is going elsewhere.<p>And all the bugs on Facebook.com is not helping matters. Especially on desktop.<p>We really started to examine all of this and it’s startling the quick decline.

If you thought Cambridge Analytica was bad, wait &#x27;til you find out what a China-based company can do with detailed preference and arousal data from young people.

Am I part of an aged, dying userbase no one cares about? I barely endured my third decade and yet I do not want to watch reels, TikToks or any other video that contains text, adhd and &quot;fun&quot; content. I just want to look at the photos and videos people I personally know uploaded, preferably ordered by how long ago they got posted.

You know I just had a look at Reels and of the four on my screen, three have a tiktok logo. People are making &quot;reels&quot; already by just taking someone elses popular video and uploading it as a reel.<p>Which has the effect of: Advertising tiktok.

Search for yoga on TikTok and Instagram and compare the results. Guess which one returns almost all softcore pornography vs actually educational content. It&#x27;s not a surprise which one teenagers would find more engaging.

I haven&#x27;t installed TikTok on my phone because of privacy concerns but I am curious to check out its content. I think there is a &quot;safe&quot; way of using TikTok, but I have yet to try it.<p>1. I have read that you can browse the site completely in the browser, and even as a PWA. So this prevents all of the concerns coming from the privileges and permissions native apps have.<p>2. You can even browse it without an account (supposedly). But if I do create an account, I&#x27;d create a new email for it<p>3. I will browse it only with Firefox for Android, with uBlock Origin installed, only in private windows (giving uBlock Origin access to private windows, which I already do)<p>4. Even though there is no &quot;in-app&quot; browser in their web client, I would never enter any personal details or log-in into anything from links I click. If I&#x27;m really into a product advertised I&#x27;d just search for it in a new tab<p>5. Use a VPN<p>I know this is not fool-proof, I&#x27;m still going to be fingerprinted and uniquely identified, but this should prevent collection of the things that concern _me_ specifically like location, contacts, ability to scan phone&#x27;s storage and see what other apps I have installed, reading my clipboard, biometric prints, etc.<p>Is it worth going through these hoops just for an entertainment app? Probably not, I might get tired of it real quick. We&#x27;ll see

And instead of playing to their strengths, IG tries to jump and chase a competitor. Doesn&#x27;t look like a very smart move

I so liked to to doomscroll Instagram because it would just find nice pictures for me, but it’s ruined with Reels.<p>First, they rig it so that on every page, there’ll be a reel. You can spot them and flag each and every one with “I don’t want to see this” and it will continue trying to show you reels. It’s definitely an explicit rule to show Reels.<p>Each Reel it finds for me has some mildly interesting-looking footage combined with the worst sounds you can think of.<p>Usually it’s some generic down-shifted voice that says “drop the bass” before these clipped, farting sounds come out of the phone.<p>The best example I ran across had someone putting lubricant until a ball bearing, coupled with what seems to be a cover of a Justin Bieber song but with what sound like cartoon dog voices.<p>In a dull moment I would like to mindlessly scroll for pretty pictures. It used to show me rockets and women. I like rockets and I like women. Now it shows me farty bass.

It&#x27;s the app cycle. People always think the shiny new thing is better. The new thing is definitely way cooler than the old thing your parents are on.

i dont know.... i never understood &quot;hip&quot; things. back when orkut was all the rage, i was stuck being anonymous. then facebook, twitter, whatsapp, instagram, sarahah app, titok, youtube shorts, i could not be convinced enough to maintain an account there.....<p>i mean i am on HN, reddit but i dont have my own name, my &quot;social graph&quot; isnt tied to my AFK identity, my AFK friends aren&#x27;t my online friends, my location is not my location........ the original internet user

The sad thing is Instagram&#x27;s explore tab used to give me excellent personalized content (gardening and architecture) but when they added reels it all went away. At first it was dancing teenagers and now it&#x27;s random celebrities and weird sped up videos of people cleaning. It doesn&#x27;t matter how many times I mark it as &quot;not interesting&quot;, it just keeps pushing it.

Interesting read, would be interesting to see how TikTok optimizes their recommendation algorithms and what kind of metrics they use.<p>Like another commenter said, it may also be that Instagram had already a use case and a &quot;spot&quot; in peoples minds so its harder to change that mentality to the one that TikTok naturally gained and as such people tend to upload &quot;better&quot; content on there.

Stop asking Gen Z for anything. Fuck me, I don&#x27;t even know what a Gen Z is.<p>Sounds like a CPU for all I care. A cheap one too.<p>Instagram is dying ?<p>No, I am dying. Lend a helping hand. Buy me an ice-cream.<p>People are cognitive screwed from all this socalled social network bullshit that turns friends, family and idols into a circus of self-proclaimed everything.<p>Kylie Jenner ? Really ?<p>I can almost taste the sugary feeling in the mouth of teenagers when they fall over the same line of self-staging freaks.<p>Turn it off. Buy a small library. Read.<p>Pack a suitcase. Buy a train ticket. See the world.<p>Concentrate. Please.

I sort of like the SurgeHQ blog from a few past articles I&#x27;ve read on it, and this article is similarly mostly thought-provoking and well-done. But it pulls off 1 (arguably) disgusting trick IMO. It goes from talking about what users really want and then launches into some &#x27;do you really want people to click on conspiracy theories&#x27; type of value-judgement that seems antithetical to actual user-preferences. Again, who decides what&#x27;s true? Should it be the government? Should it be Mark Zuckerberg or other corporate giants? Is Mark Zuckerberg and others like him my parent who knows what&#x27;s best for me? What if people actually want to see that content and decide for themselves what&#x27;s true or not? Are the people to be treated as adults or children? That one thing from the article is probably not meaningful to most here, but I didn&#x27;t like that specific part.

Slighlty chilling reading these opinions, like a focus group with Christmas turkeys in November. TikTok and Instagram seem equally devoid of useful content to me, one just has more dancing. YouTube is the exception, partly because they pay creators better. YouTube creators seem to be living lives they actually desire to lead.

Instagram is not dying. There is no other app in the world with the same reach and installation percentage among young people. Instagram is losing at usage time sure, but I would wager that 95% of young people in first world countries have an Instagram profile and this is not. Its almost a necessity.

I loved the humor of the first part of the post.<p>IMO the problem of Instagram is not only related to Reels, but is more generalized. For the past ~5 years I have been noticing a serious decline in the quality of the interactions and of the content around.<p>Any interaction nowadays on Instagram feels fake, for the sole purpose of getting attention. The old-style pictures that are almost sure to generate more interactions are recycled old jokes that people with common sense are now tired of reading, but somehow a lot of users still enjoy them.<p>There are also some unexplainable phenomenas, like pictures with absolutely trash content that probably took zero effort to produce, getting thousands of likes and comments.<p>These situations (and more...) for me have eventually taken away all the fun of using the app.

Instagram is owned by influencers while TikTok is extremely successful at making emerge videos from random people that have captured insanely interesting moments, Instagram won&#x27;t let the spotlight go from influencers to the common people.

I like this piece, but it basically measured which app do you use more. If they wanted to really drill in, they should have had folks compare performance on new accounts. I still suspect TikTok would win? But you’d get cleaner results.

Yes, put a looping gif with no way to stop it right in the middle of the text. Thank you

It just seems that when compared with TikTok, Instagram Reels is still much smaller as a short video platform. Where the creator communities is yet to be built, the data is probably weighted heavily on the Instagram followers, what do we do on such a new but may be potentially large platform? how do we <i>cold start</i> based what we already have? We snap some historically hot videos from TikTok. I think that&#x27;s why videos on Reels are kind of old.<p>A new platform is not built on a single day. Even creators found a new platform and decided the first thing they do should be re-posting their old works.

I think this is a nice and interesting article, but as far as I understood they showed the participants where the videos was from. It makes the result hard to evaluate. You take a group of participants which are likely to prefer TikTok already and think of Reels as a meme and then you say &quot;these are TikToks, these are Reels, which do you prefer?&quot;. Of course these people will probably like TikTok way more.<p>In no way I want to defend Reels (in fact I don&#x27;t consume neither TikTok nor Reels), but a blind test would have been really really important here.

In a better world, each social app would know its place and would hone that to a fine edge. But there&#x27;s no incentive to do that, there&#x27;s no infinite growth there. Social apps should be narrowly focused tools that do their job perfectly, with very little overlap between. For what it&#x27;s worth, I don&#x27;t think any app can expand much past its original focus anyway, but the fact that they try spoils the experience.

I find the comments in the article align with analysis from this A16z podcast on TikTok <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;overcast.fm&#x2F;+BlzHoDbOw" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;overcast.fm&#x2F;+BlzHoDbOw</a><p>The point being TiKTok does a ton of labelling of videos that allows the algorithm to “see” the content - or at least qualifies lots of elements of each video. And then optimises for joy and happiness responses from users.<p>Other useful observations in the podcast

Facebook products have the most complicated UX ever. Try their settings menu with unnessesary permission settings.<p>Best UX is the product without the need of settings though.

I&#x27;ve tried to sign up for instagram, but it always said &quot;email is already used&quot;, including for emails that I had just created.<p>Maybe they&#x27;re losing users because nobody can sign up?<p>Or maybe the web sign up doesn&#x27;t work, and you&#x27;re only allowed to sign up with a facebook account (now they have your data) or the mobile app (they also have your data).<p>If so that&#x27;s the kind of abject dishonesty that might also lose you users.

Cal Newport had written a blog[0] post about the very same reason which worths reading a while ago.<p>[0]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.calnewport.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2022&#x2F;08&#x2F;01&#x2F;tiktoks-poison-pill&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.calnewport.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2022&#x2F;08&#x2F;01&#x2F;tiktoks-poison-pi...</a>

One of the options in the user research as to why you preferred one or the other was “better algorithm”, as an alternative to “more uplifting content” or whatever. Surely ‘better algorithm’ is just the means by which the user experience is delivered? No one uses a social media app ‘for the algorithm’!

I think the issue with Instagram is the “follow the money” mentality from a lot of its users. I follow around 600 accounts, many of which are artists and brands, and I definitely saw a drastic shift towards video content.<p>I do not open Instagram and expect to look at pictures alone unless it is from friends, pretty much.

Dumb TikTok question: is the TikTok logo and branding supposed to recall old anaglyph 3D?

Can we finally agree that &#x27;currently cool&#x27; is no longer a moat, and stop giving insane 10x price&#x2F;sales valuations to social media companies on the promise of eternal future growth &#x2F; profitability.

Could it be that Instagram isn&#x27;t losing, but rather, they&#x27;ve won and they&#x27;re cashing out while Tiktok is still trying to grow so that oneday it too can milk its users as hard?

Now that TikTok has handily overthrown Meta, I vow my next company will eschew tech and sell Scalextrics or some shit with an operational moat

A social network with 2 billion users is dying the same way as an average 20 year old is also technically in the process of dying.

Will china dominate social media market?<p>Seems very likely<p>I bet they dont rely as hard on algos when it comes to content, but thats just a guess

is there a difference in how tiktok handled music and copyright strikes (or at least for a while after launch until it was big)? I assume part of tiktok&#x27;s success is that people can put in current music at all without getting instastruck by a neural net

Instagram isn’t dying. It’s the default app while commuting, bored, taking a dump, “looked at all my other apps and I’m bored, mindless app surfing, etc.<p>Also, Instagram adds value as an app that people truly enjoy from a consumption standpoint.<p>It’s not going anyway.

This is the way of the figurative boomer, in the parlance of our times. In 5-10 years, something will have replaced TikTok, if trends of the past continue. It&#x27;s possible, in the same way that humans broke out of evolutionary balance, that an app such as TikTok and its machine learning algorithms can break out of the evolutionary balance of what teens find intriguing or &quot;in&quot;, but that remains to be seen.<p>I don&#x27;t know why any company would try to target the <i>current</i> &quot;in&quot; thing. That shows that not only are they behind but that they are behind a minimum of two generations of &quot;in&quot; apps&#x2F;things. So Google and Facebook are just showing that they only know what <i>was</i> next and not what is actually next.

The gifs don&#x27;t work on firefox.

TLDR; Human wants and needs are two different things. If you only measure things like click throughs, you may end up measuring &quot;wants&quot; and therefore risk long term dissatisfaction as &quot;needs&quot; are not met. So the idea here is to engage paid human rating crew who will supposedly more focus on &quot;needs&quot; (because they are paid, they will presumably prefer less of garbage&#x2F;controversial&#x2F;clickbaits).

Instagram and Tiktok serve completely different purposes. Neither is dying.